Germany: The importance of being very earnest

Weimar's cultural credentials are impressive but unsettling, says Paul Lay. After all that history, you might need a pint in Goethe's local

FOR 300 years, the Hotel Elephant, the stately cornerstone of Weimar's central square, the Markt, has been a frequent host to genius: Schiller, J S Bach, Liszt, Wagner and Tolstoy have all enjoyed its comforts. And it provides the evocative setting for Lotte in Weimar, Thomas Mann's joyous meditation on the life and work of the city's most famous resident, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Mann's judgment "the greatest German of all".

There are no prizes for guessing who is the worst but, ironically, the present-day elegance of the Elephant owes more to his input than anyone else's. Adolf Hitler oversaw the renovation of this city institution, maintaining a suite for his frequent visits - Room 100, if you must - and delivering speeches from the hotel balcony to the throng below, eager to associate himself with Weimar's concentration of past glories, while bellowing contempt for the short-lived republic that bore the city's name.

Such cultural contradiction, an unsettling mixture of brilliance and barbarity, is at the heart of this year's European City of Culture. Worst of all, this "cradle of German classicism" is but a short bus ride from Buchenwald concentration camp, sited with bewildering cynicism on one of Goethe's favourite places of reflection, Ettersburg Hill.

Those behind the Culture City programme - most of them from the liberal-arts establishment of western Germany - are determined to lay bare these tensions, expressing a desire to "irritate" the notoriously philistine locals, merely a decade out of the mental straitjacket of the former DDR.

Within one of Weimar's handful of art-deco cafes, over Kaffee und Kuchen, I questioned a young woman, a member of the Culture City's organising team, about their intentions. Her hushed invective screamed frustration.

"The people in this city are so small-minded, I am really shocked. Most of them are not interested in culture, just vslkisch kitsch," she said. "Anyway, we are here to attract visitors, not please the locals."

"You won't be staying on, then?" I asked, mischievously.

"I'll be straight back to Munich as soon as my contract ends."

She took me for a stroll around the Markt. It was 1pm on Saturday when, a practice admirable or archaic depending on your point of view, the shutters come down on German consumerism until dawn on Monday, to the obvious frustration of AuslSnders seeking souvenirs and to the apparent delight of the surprisingly proletarian locals who, by and large, cling to the customs and couture of the old Eastern bloc - tie-dyed jeans, moustaches and atrocious short-top, long-back haircuts.

In the shadow of the Elephant, its prices and Euro-chic aesthetic beyond them, they pass the hours milling around dozens of cheap, makeshift food stalls, chomping on bratwurst, knocking back Schwarzbier, smoking heroically, laughing out loud.

Weimar's more reactionary elements have landed their first blow in the culture wars, quashing the proposal by the French conceptual artist Daniel Buren to redesign the Rollplatz, site of the city's first settlement, with a grid of alternating white and red columns.

But similarly provocative plans to display a collection of Goethe's drawings within Buchenwald and to exhibit furniture made by the camp's inmates in the house of Schiller, the author of the anthem of European brotherhood, Ode to Joy, are likely to go ahead. Physical opposition to such schemes from neo-Nazis has spilled on to the city's streets.

Handsome but not spectacularly so, Weimar could be just another of the provincial market towns, little changed in centuries, that break up the forests of the German Länder of Thuringia. In truth, it is barely a city at all, just 62,000 strong, with a compact urban centre easily traversed in an afternoon. "In Weimar, there are no distances," said Mann; but there is an awful lot to see.

The Goethehaus, for half a century the home of Europe's last "universal genius", is the principal attraction, especially this year; the 250th anniversary of Goethe's birth, albeit in Frankfurt, is the main reason for the Culture City appellation. His was a life (very German this) thoroughly examined, documented and analysed: nothing, it seems, is not known about him, his lovers, his friendships and his work.

Goethe was an inveterate hoarder. Every room (and there are many) is crammed with artefacts: paintings, documents, pottery, furniture, musical instruments, even his beloved collection of rocks. The Juno Room, overwhelmed by a gigantic statue of the eponymous goddess, is in particular need of a clear-out.

A couple of elderly German women in stiff tweed and severe steel specs examined every nook and cranny, as if looking for dust, cocooned by concentration from the stream of schoolchildren, who dragged their heels and looked, like all adolescents, lank and bored, their spotty profiles faring badly in comparison with Goethe's fine array of classical busts. For them, I suspect, German culture begins with Kraftwerk.

It is only in the simple, eloquent study, ringed off and visible through a tiny door (the proportions of the tables and chairs indicate the great man was of less than imposing physical stature) that one gets a real sense of the tranquil conditions under which Goethe dictated his masterworks to Eckermann, his stoical secretary. But such was the crush, I got about 30 seconds to peer in before escaping to the house's allotment-like garden.

My experience highlights a logistical problem for Weimar. A maximum of 800 people a day can sidle through the house, which, by my reckoning, adds up to about 200,000 a year. So, with five million visitors expected in the city this year, where should the other 4,800,000 go?

Perhaps they will head past Henry van der Welde's refurbished Bauhaus University to the "New" Cemetery, a dark Gothic enclosure, like some forbidding afterthought of Edgar Allan Poe, where sleek rooks gather on the stooping iron crosses that mark each isolated grave and where, at the far end, atop a gentle slope, is a mausoleum, the final resting place of Goethe, Schiller and their patron, Prince Carl August, whose black iron casket bears the motto "Boldly and wisely".

Or they could enjoy the library founded by Carl August's equally enlightened mother, Anna Amalia, and bathe in the sumptuous splendour of its Rococo Hall, all spiral stairways, brass and leather-bound volumes.

Farther along the Ilm river is the Castle Museum, entered through a star-patterned courtyard, where portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder of a bold Luther and his alluring wife, the escaped nun Katherina von Bora, share wall space with works from the Weimar School, a German take on 19th-century Impressionism whose subject matter is a heady and typically Teutonic combination of naturism and potato gathering.

However, the city's most celebrated artwork is elsewhere, in the city church of Saints Peter and Paul, known as the Herderkirche after Johann von Herder, the folklorist, Hebrew scholar and antagonist of Goethe, who was its pastor for three decades. The exterior's severe bulk gives way to an interior of lurid baroque colour. At the altar stands a triptych, Cranach the Elder's again, an allegory-rich jumble of Biblical scenes that could take a lifetime to unweave, with a crucified Christ at its centre flanked by figures including the artist himself and an insistent Luther pointing to "The Word".

But perhaps visitors will bite the bullet and board the No 6 bus from Goetheplatz to Buchenwald. It is a journey they are encouraged to take, although "Buchenwald, bitte" is a discomforting request and I had the feeling, as I handed over my DM2.50, that the driver sensed my unease. I did not need to state my destination.

The regulars get off long before Ettersberg Hill, where the bus turns left past a memorial of jagged, ghostly metal figures. From there, it is a bumpy crawl along a cobbled military road cut through a pine forest, which, when I visited in midwinter, was thick with snow. It was a cold, half-lit afternoon, which seemed right. The sun should not shine on a place like this.

The bus finally pulls in before a trio of nondescript, functional buildings, former barracks, now the entrance. Skirting around the edge of the camp, I came across the rail terminal: a single buffer, the end of the line. From here, visitors, as prisoners did, make their way through the gates inscribed "Jedem das Seine" - "Each to his own". Beyond, there is just a flattened ash-grey settlement, exhausted, lifeless land, quarantined by barbed wire.

This grave of 56,000 souls was covered in a shroud of dirty snow, the human condition reduced to monochrome. Culture of a kind, but more that of the Petri dish than the salon.

Bleak, rocky memorials to gipsies and Jews are adorned by a few dead candles. And an RAF wreath, laid in memory of Canadian airmen who died here, provides an unexpected, familiar blush of colour. The vast storeroom at the edge of the camp, one of the few surviving buildings, houses an exhibition, full and frank, which takes its cumulative toll. One is relieved at leaving.

Later, I came across a phrase by the novelist John David Morley, one of the few Anglo-Saxons to have engaged with Germany's ambiguous legacy: "One wishes it could go away. One wishes one could bring back the dead and the civilisation that was murdered with them. It has to be included, however. Otherwise, the iconography becomes a fake."

It is a point the organisers of this year's European City of Culture are keen to stress and for that they deserve congratulation. Weimar demands our attention.

The nearest airport to Weimar is Leipzig/Halle. Lufthansa (0345 737747) flies there daily from Heathrow via Frankfurt, Munich or Düsseldorf; returns from £136, including tax. There are frequent inter-city train connections from Leipzig to Weimar. The journey takes about an hour and the single fare is about £12.50.

Where to eat and drinkThuringian cuisine is lighter and tastier than one might expect and there are plenty of restaurants, bars and bierkellers of uniformly high standard. Try the Felsenkeller, Humboldtstrasse 37 (03643 850306), for RostbrStl, the local speciality of spare-rib steak served with onions; particularly delicious when accompanied by the Schwarzbier brewed on the premises (about £9). Alternatively, stalls around the city offer great bratwurst, traditionally accompanied by beer or tea and strong rum.

The Elephantenkeller, beneath the Hotel Elephant, is affordable and little changed since J S Bach lived next door. Pickled trout accompanied by a half-litre bottle of beer costs about £7. The Weisses Schwan (White Swan), next to the Goethehaus on Frauenplatz, is something of a tourist trap, but it really was the writer's local. Note the Napoleonic cannonball embedded in its wall.

Weimar's more radical traditions are upheld by the student crowd in the smoky cafe attached to the avant-garde ACC Gallery (Burgplatz 1-2; opposite the castle). Next door is the more refined Cafe Residenz (Grüner Markt 4), where the young Marlene Dietrich once trod the boards. Good for Kaffee und Kuchen.

ReadingThomas Mann's Lotte in Weimar (Minerva, £7.99) is the classic evocation of the city in the golden age of Goethe, but it is badly in need of a new English translation. Walter Kaufman's parallel text translation of Goethe's Faust, a work with an unjustly daunting reputation, is highly recommended. Unfortunately, it is available only on import from the US (Anchor/Doubleday, $7.95).